Quotes from Dale Steyn

South African cricket, we're pretty resilient.

When I made my one-day debut for South Africa I met some of the Aussies for the first time. We lost the game and when I shook the hands of players I just wanted them to look me in the eye and acknowledge I had competed.

It's enough to play for South Africa and take wickets for South Africa, and then I managed to get 400. I never thought that that would happen.

When I'm in South Africa, I make it a point to take my dogs out to the beach.

There's a lot of guys who can bowl 150 km/h when you give them the ball when they're fresh in the morning, but can they do it late in the afternoon when it's boiling hot and they're bowling their 20th over for the day? I want to be able to do that and I want to be the only guy who is able to do that.

If you are playing in the right conditions, there is always motivation to bowl fast. If you are playing in the wrong condition then you want to be a batsman.

I never want to restrict myself and say I'm at my ultimate peak, I'm always looking to take myself to a higher level.

It's something that I've wanted to do for a while, play Big Bash. Unfortunately representing the Proteas for the bulk of my career over Christmas time we've always got Test matches on, the Boxing Day and New Year's Test matches. So I haven't been available.

One of my highlights of being a Proteas player is that at one stage we were the No. 1 team across all formats.

In South Africa, we kind of like looking for things that unite people in big, big groups.

When you don't have sport, it's like, oh, what do we fall back onto? And I think Nelson Mandela was the first person to really say that: sport unites people in a way that nothing else does. And if you take sport away, then I don't know really what we have.

I don't know what it is about fast bowling. I guess it's the ability to do something that nobody else can really do.

Allan Donald and Shaun Pollock were my heroes, so I thought averaging 22 or 23 and taking five-wicket hauls was normal.

I'm normally quite restrictive in the runs department.

Form is difficult. You can't predict form, it is up and down for any player.

Steve Smith is a marvelous player.

As long as I've got that urge and that fight and fire inside of me I'll continue and records will come and records will be broken. But the day I don't feel that kind of stuff I'm happy to walk away.

From the moment I became an established international cricketer I always had a strong feeling that I should be doing some 'good' while I had that profile, using it to try and make a difference.

Coaches have plans and structures, and if you're not in those plans you shouldn't take it personally.

Every ball matters - if with the last ball the opposition need four to win, and you've gone for 96, can you get that out of your mind and bowl a dot ball and win the game?

When I first started the biggest thing I wanted was for the opposition to acknowledge me.

I have four dogs - Sadi, a Retriever, and Oscar, Ruby and Bella, who are Yorkies.

With Test cricket, it's very important that you are bowling at high speed but T20 cricket is a great way to be versatile.

In my opinion Test cricket is the best version of this game. It tests you mentally, physically, emotionally.